My first visit to a war cemetery was in 1969 while on a school trip to Belgium as a 16 year old youth. I had seen war films and had just started to read the history of WW2. My father signed up under age into the Royal Navy in the last war and used to relate tales of his experiences in the Far East, North Africa and Normandy. I thought I knew it all, but the impact of seeing row upon row of headstones stretching to the horizon at Tyne Cot military cemetery just below the ridge at Passchendaele to the east of Ypres confounded me.

Each headstone represented a life lost, but not wasted. I made some photographs with my trusty Practica camera and printed up a 16×12 when I came home. I remember bending the printing paper as I exposed to get a blurry effect to give the impression that the headstones stretched to infinity. I still have that print and the negatives neatly filed away. I was hooked.

Many years later I accompanied a group of WW1 veterans with the author Lynn McDonald back to the battlefields of northern Europe while working for The Times.

I became the de facto war graves photographer. When I joined the Independent I put forward once or twice a year a story from Northern France or Belgium, visiting veterans, desecrated cemeteries and burials of newly found bodies.


Menin Gate, Ypres, Belgium: over 54,000 names of soldiers who have no known final resting place are engraved on the walls of the memorial.

Imagine my delight when five years ago the press officer at the CWGC, Peter Francis, asked me if I was interested in doing a book about the Commission. We started off slowly, a few days at a time, to make sure that we were both happy with the results. Without Peter’s vision and his confidence in me, this project would have been a non starter.

My first work was shot in the bleak winter of 2002. Black days with brooding skies, extremely melancholic and very much my preferred way of making images. The days were short, so no time to hang around for perfect photographic conditions, I just shot what I saw as if working for a newspaper. There wasn’t a lot of colour…or joy. I was making pictures for me and not the client. I was trying to be photographically clever without fully understanding the remit of the Commission.

I did some more work for the CWGC over the next few months and the book idea was always discussed but never commissioned. The whole project needed a kick. Money of course was always going to be an issue. The CWGC operate worldwide in over 150 countries in 23,000 locations caring for the memory of 1.7 million fallen soldiers. I could see a lifetime of work ahead.

Then at the beginning of 2006 we got the green light. A workable budget, a publisher and a writer co-ordinator in Julie Summers. She had experience in organising exhibitions with the Henry Moore Foundation and had written books on Shackleton and the POW’s at the River Kwai. We were off.


Ferryland Old General Cemetery, Newfoundland, Canada: the lone grave of engine room artificer Norman Benner, died 21 June 1942

There was a condition though. Please, I was asked, can we have some images that show off our cemeteries in the best possible light. The CWGC employ hundreds of gardeners worldwide and I was asked to show off the fine horticulture as much as possible. I was very happy to oblige and so started a trip around the world chasing the seasons to get the best of each and every location.

It’s not every day, if ever, that a client asks you to spend the best part of six months traveling around the world for them. This was a one off and one that required military planning.